Well connected, provided the connection that matters most to you is the broadband. Two stations sit on a line into London. Nearly half the workforce never needs it. The fibre is fast almost everywhere. The buses exist, but they won't build your week around them.
Oxted and Hurst Green stations both sit on the Oxted Line. Trains run north through East Croydon to London Victoria or London Bridge, and south to Uckfield via Edenbridge Town or to East Grinstead via Lingfield. Woldingham is also close by. Only about 5% of working residents commute by train, a share that looks like an oversight for a town with its own line to two London termini. Buses carry about 1%, from 67 stops.
What most people do is stay home. In the 2021 Census, 47% of working residents worked from home, 36% drove and about 7% walked. Cycling barely registered. About 12% of households have no car, and 47% run two or more. The commute is optional here, but the car isn't: Oxted has made its peace with the traffic by sending nearly half of it back upstairs to the spare room.
The Department for Transport's modelled journey times put the nearest town centre about 9 minutes away by car and about 17 by public transport. They're modelled for the area as a whole, not timed from any particular front door. The same statistics give about 13 minutes by bike and about 25 on foot. A 25-minute walk into town is the sort of distance that turns into a drive the first time it rains.
Broadband is the strong suit. Gigabit-capable connections reach about 87% of premises, and superfast about 98%. No meaningful share falls below the universal minimum. That's why the train commute share looks the way it does. Mobile coverage from at least one operator reaches effectively every postcode, and all operators together cover about 100%. So the signal drops out on the train, not at home.
For a typical commute, that makes Oxted a two-speed town. A hybrid worker with a desk upstairs and a season ticket used twice a week is well served. Someone who needs to reach a job somewhere without a station will be driving, and will do it most days.
The same Department for Transport statistics cover everyday destinations. A GP is about 9 minutes by car, 18 by public transport or 25 on foot. A food store is about 11 minutes' walk or 7 minutes' drive. Reaching employment takes about 19 minutes by car and 28 by public transport. A hospital is the outlier: about 30 minutes by car and about an hour by public transport. That hour is the finding, and anyone planning around regular appointments should plan around it. The public transport figures date from 2019 and services have been cut in many places since, so treat them with more caution than the car and walk times.
The current bus timetable is thinner than the stop count suggests. Each stop sees about 38 scheduled departures on an average weekday, but fewer than two buses an hour at peak. Every stop has some weekend service. It's a bus network, but not one that rewards spontaneity.
Road noise reaches everywhere. Every postcode in Oxted sits near or above 65 decibels of road noise, the level at which official mapping treats road noise as significant, and the loudest band present reaches 75 decibels. Rail noise is a separate source: about 37% of postcodes sit near or above 65 decibels from the railway, peaking at 70. None of that tells you how loud a particular bedroom will be. It does tell you to visit at rush hour, not only on a quiet Sunday.
Oxted is better connected than most towns its size, as long as the journey you care about runs through a router or a London terminus. For anything else, including the hospital, keep the car.